A hospital executive whose entire career has been built in South Alabama will now help set direction for the organization that represents hospitals across the state. Ben Hansert, chief operating officer of Mobile Infirmary, has been elected as a Member at Large on the Alabama Hospital Association Board of Trustees during the association’s recent annual meeting.
A career that started at the bedside
Hansert’s path through the region’s health care system is unusual for a hospital chief operating officer: he started as a clinician. He began his career as a registered respiratory therapist at Mobile Infirmary before moving into administration and advancing through a series of leadership roles. That origin matters in hospital administration, where the day’s decisions — staffing ratios, equipment purchases, patient flow — land directly on the people delivering care, and a chief operating officer who once worked the floor understands those decisions from both sides of the desk.
His résumé includes:
Executive director of Infirmary Medical Clinics, overseeing the outpatient network — the expanding web of physician practices and outpatient services that increasingly delivers the routine care once provided inside hospital walls.
President of North Baldwin Infirmary in Bay Minette, giving him direct experience running a smaller community hospital serving rural Baldwin County — the kind of facility where a single administrator answers for everything from the emergency room to the kitchen, and where every hiring and reimbursement decision carries more weight than it would in a larger institution.
Chief operating officer of Mobile Infirmary since 2021, a role that places him over daily operations at one of the largest hospitals on the Alabama Gulf Coast — a facility that anchors tertiary care for the region and serves as a referral center for communities from Washington County to the Baldwin County beaches.
That combination — clinical training, outpatient management, small community hospital leadership and large acute-care operations — covers nearly the full spectrum of how health care is delivered in this part of the state. Trustees who have seen only the large-hospital view of the industry tend to think in terms of systems and scale; trustees who have run a small community hospital know what it means when obstetric services or overnight coverage disappear from a town like Bay Minette. Hansert has now worked at both ends of that line.
What the board does
As a Member at Large, Hansert will serve alongside fellow trustees guiding the association’s work supporting hospitals and improving health care for communities across Alabama. “Ben brings a unique combination of clinical experience, operational expertise and proven leadership,” said Danne Howard, president and CEO of the Alabama Hospital Association. “Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a strong commitment to advancing patient care, supporting health care professionals, and strengthening the hospitals and communities he serves.”
Founded in 1921, the Alabama Hospital Association represents hospitals and health systems statewide, working through advocacy, education and member services. Its board sets priorities on the issues that determine whether hospitals stay open: reimbursement policy, workforce shortages, regulatory burden and rural access. In practice, that means the board’s positions echo through statehouse budget negotiations, Medicaid policy debates and the federal rulemaking processes that shape what hospitals are paid and what they are required to do.
Hansert has been engaged with the association for years, having served three terms as president of its Southwest Regional Council — the body representing hospitals in the Mobile and Baldwin County region. He has also held leadership roles with a range of health care and community organizations, a pattern of service that made the statewide board seat a natural next step after a decade-plus of regional involvement.
Why a South Alabama seat matters
Representation on the state board is not a ceremonial matter for this corner of Alabama. The region’s hospitals face a distinct set of pressures that are not always visible from Montgomery or Birmingham.
Rural hospital fragility. Small facilities serving Washington, Clarke, Escambia and Monroe counties operate on thin margins, and closures or service reductions in those communities push patients toward Mobile for care that used to be available closer to home. Every rural closure adds volume to the region’s urban emergency departments and adds travel time — sometimes an hour or more — to the routine care of families who live far from the city.
Hurricane readiness. Gulf Coast hospitals carry evacuation, sheltering and continuity-of-operations obligations that inland facilities simply do not. A hurricane season plan at a Mobile hospital means deciding in advance which patients move, which generators hold, and how a facility keeps operating through the days after landfall when roads, power and supply chains are all compromised at once.
Seasonal population swings. Emergency departments in the coastal counties absorb a substantial visitor population during the summer months, when beach traffic can effectively double the demand for urgent care on a peak weekend — a staffing and supply challenge that inland hospitals never face.
Workforce competition. Recruiting and retaining nurses, therapists and technicians remains one of the most persistent operational challenges facing every hospital in the region, with traveling contracts, signing bonuses and neighboring states’ systems all bidding for the same finite pool of licensed professionals.
A trustee who has personally run both a community hospital in Bay Minette and a major acute-care center in Mobile brings firsthand knowledge of both ends of that spectrum to the table. When the board weighs a position on rural reimbursement or workforce funding, the argument lands with more force when one of the people voting has lived the consequences in his own facilities.
Local impact
Mobile Infirmary remains one of the largest employers and health care providers in Mobile County, and decisions made at the state association level — on legislative priorities, Medicaid policy and workforce initiatives — filter down to the services available to patients in every town from Citronelle to Bayou La Batre. Hospital employment ripples through the regional economy well beyond the hospital walls, supporting physician practices, suppliers, pharmacies and the small businesses that surround any large medical campus.
For residents across the region, the practical significance of the election is simple: when the state’s hospital leadership sets its agenda, someone who has spent his career caring for and managing hospitals in South Alabama will be in the room.
Mobile Infirmary’s place in the region
Understanding the weight of the board seat requires understanding the institution Hansert runs day to day. Mobile Infirmary has served the city since the 19th century and grew into the largest hospital in the region, anchoring a network that spans acute care, outpatient clinics and specialty services. Its campus draws patients from a wide catchment area that includes not just Mobile County but the surrounding rural counties, where the nearest alternative for advanced care often lies an hour’s drive away in any direction.
The hospital’s scale gives it both reach and responsibility. It trains and employs generations of the region’s nurses and allied health professionals, sustains specialist services — cardiology, oncology, surgery — that no smaller nearby facility could support on its own, and functions as the backstop when rural hospitals transfer patients whose needs exceed local capacity. Those transfer patterns are the quiet infrastructure of rural health care in South Alabama, and they run through Mobile’s large hospitals by necessity.
The association’s work behind the headlines
Most residents will never attend an Alabama Hospital Association board meeting, but the organization’s work touches them more directly than its low profile suggests. The association is the industry’s voice in Montgomery, where each legislative session brings proposals on Medicaid coverage, certificate-of-need rules, tort liability and funding formulas that determine how hospitals are reimbursed for the care they provide. It also runs the educational programs and shared services that keep administrators, nurses and trustees current on a regulatory environment that changes constantly.
The board’s steering role is most visible in moments of crisis. During the pandemic years, hospital associations coordinated the daily state-level response — capacity reporting, staffing surges, supply chain problems and the public messaging that determined how communities understood what their local facilities could and could not handle. The Southwest Regional Council that Hansert led for three terms played exactly that coordinating role for the two-county coastal region, where hurricane planning and pandemic planning overlapped more than anywhere else in the state.
A trustee from the region, for the region
Statewide boards inevitably balance regional interests, and health care is no exception. The concerns of Huntsville’s research hospitals, Birmingham’s academic medical centers and the Black Belt’s struggling rural facilities do not always align, and the composition of the board determines whose perspective is in the room when trade-offs are made. A Member at Large seat filled by a South Alabama executive ensures the Gulf Coast’s particular combination of hurricane exposure, rural fragility and seasonal demand is represented in those conversations.
For Hansert personally, the election formalizes a role he has effectively been playing for years as a regional council president: translating the operational realities of coastal Alabama hospitals into statewide policy conversations. For the hospitals he will serve alongside, it adds a trustee whose career — from respiratory therapy through clinic administration, community hospital leadership and big-hospital operations — mirrors the full range of institutions the association exists to support.
The net effect for patients between Citronelle and Bayou La Batre is indirect but real: the policies that keep hospitals open, staffed and reimbursed will now be set with a South Alabama voice at the table, informed by a career spent inside South Alabama hospitals.